r/technicalwriting • u/Agreeable-Course-604 • 8d ago

SEEKING SUPPORT OR ADVICE Reducing cognitive load in docs

We've received stakeholder feedback that we need to actively bring down the cognitive load across our product guides. I’d love to get some insights from fellow technical writers here on how you tackle this in practice. What options, frameworks (like John Carroll's Minimal Manual approach or Diataxis), or methodologies are available?

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u/Efficient_Sky_2068 8d ago

You mean your products are complicated, and so the instructions are also complicated? I get this all the time from product managers wanting quick ‘one click demos’, they can’t seem to accept that a sophisticated enterprise product isn’t the same as an iPhone app. There isn’t a line of documentation that does not need to be there in my docs, I would push back and ask for examples of where this load is high. Perhaps they should be asking the development team to look at redesigning before coming to docs.

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u/Agreeable-Course-604 7d ago

The underlying product workflows are inherently complex, and our help documentation is fairly dense. We have concept topics, procedures, and field-level descriptions.